As part of the 70th anniversary of the 1947 Partition of British India, SAI is conducting research on multiple aspects and effects of the historical event, with a team comprised of Harvard faculty, students, and research interns. “What we’re trying to capture is this moment in time,” says Jennifer Leaning, FXB Professor of the Practice of Health and Human Rights at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health. “It is an extremely important part of world history.”

Last week, SAI Director Tarun Khanna discussed the Institute's initiatives to foster entrepreneurship in South Asia. "We strongly believe that encouraging entrepreneurship will help our nation develop by opening multiple avenues for younger generations. The Lakshmi Mittal South Asia Institute is committed to disseminating knowledge, building capacity, informing policy, and engaging with issues that are shaping South Asia today, by conducting research across the South Asian region," he said.

Harvard Professors Tarun Khanna and Karim Lakhani — who are from India and Pakistan respectively — explain why they dreamt up and helped create this fully-funded program for talented first-generation college students from Africa, the Middle East and South Asia
who don't normally get a chance to apply for elite institutions. "I was on cloud nine," says Professor Khanna of his teaching experience at last year's edition. Apply now!

As part of Asian Heritage Month, the South Asian Sisters @ Harvard are producing a performance of Yoni Ki Baat, known as the South Asian Vagina Monologues. "All the women are performing monologues about experiences specific to their life on topics from sexuality, colorism, consent, and more. We really want to celebrate women and their many talents," says co-director Sheliza Jamal. The show is at 6:30 pm on April 19th.

﻿Scholars often pose a puzzle of Indian cities: why do some of the richest cities in the country suffer from crumbling water pipes and potholed roads? Sai Balakrishnan, Assistant Professor of Urban Planning at GSD, says, "to understand the complexity of urban real estate markets in liberalizing India, we must bring in the agrarian propertied classes and their embedded caste-based alliances. In the past, elites had the power to draw capital and resources to the countryside."

This report completed by Greenpeace and Harvard researchers examines the state of coal pollution and plants in Myanmar. Report authors state that "by analyzing the case, we can assume that the Myanmar government recognized the fact that Tigyit coal-fired power plant was damaging the environment and adversely impacting the people."

As a Harvard Business School alumna, Shveta Raina is the founder of Talerang, an organization that is helping develop a trained workforce in Goa. "Talerang began as a project when I was a student at Harvard Business School and I led this independent research project under the guidance of professor Das Narayandas to find a solution to India’s employability crisis," she says. "When I was researching about the employability crisis, 60 percent of the students that we spoke to said that they did not feel prepared to graduate."

What does a relationship between memory and history of Partition look like? How does one represent the negative space between conflictual concepts and interlinked stories, be they memory-history, labor-exploitation, trauma-healing, and imperialism-resistance? This exhibit brings together works by four South Asian artists that unravel challenging social issues that often fall outside of the limelight.

SAI Director Tarun Khanna and FXB Fellow Satchit Blasari will run a discussion that focuses on the effects of forced migration, the 1947 Partition of British India, and how moving large groups of people across borders affected countries such as present-day India and Pakistan. This seminar also ties into SAI's ongoing research related to the Partition.

Dr. Ryan Draft, Assistant Director of Undergraduate Studies, Neurobiology, led a trip to the National Centre for Biological Sciences in Bangalore. "These students came from four different concentrations (Human Evolutionary Biology, Neurobiology, Organismic and Evolutionary Biology, and Applied Math), and they ranged in year from freshman to junior. All of them had an interest in learning about the culture of India as well as developing professional skills in a world-class biological laboratory," Draft said.